1. Field
The disclosed and claimed concept relates generally to a feeding apparatus for an animal and, more particularly, to a feeding apparatus that enables controlled amounts of food to be dispensed for consumption by an animal.
2. Related Art
Gravity feeding devices are generally well known in the relevant art. Such gravity-operated devices typically include a hopper or other storage receptacle that is configured to store food and that is connected with another receptacle such as bowl or trough into which the food is dispensed for consumption by an animal. As the animal eats the food in the bowl or trough, the food reservoir refills that space in the bowl according to the static angle of repose of the (particulate) food that is being dispensed.
For animals such as dogs and cats that spend some or all of their time indoors, amounts of food that are essentially unlimited can cause the animal to become overweight, which is undesirable. As such, pet owners have provided food to pets by transferring a measured amount of food from a bin or a bag into the pet's bowl, or they have employed an electronically-operated portion control food dispenser. While these methodologies have been generally effective for their intended purposes, they have not been without limitation.
Such manual measurement of an amount of food and the transfer of such food from a bin or bag into a pet's bowl can become tedious. Moreover, the accuracy of the amount of food delivered to the pet is typically related to the amount of attention paid by the pet owner during the measuring operation, which the result that the amounts of food provided to an animal are not accurate unless a certain level of metal effort is expended in feeding the animal a predetermined amount of food. Alternatively, an electronically-operated portion control food dispenser can be costly, and the electronics are operated either by batteries which require periodic replacement or AC power which limits the location of the device to a position nearby an electrical outlet. It thus would be desired to provide an improved solution that overcomes certain shortcomings known in the relevant art.